Handel

by Handel- The Man

  After nine performances of Ariosti’s Artaserse and a successful Giulio Cesare revival, the second of Handel’s new works for the season was brought on. For the first time in his English career, Handel turned to the writings of Antonio Salvi, whose libretto Vincer se stesso e la maggior vittoria (Rodrigo) he had set during his stay in Italy. Salvi’s speciality was precisely the sort of ‘human predicament’ story that was bound to appeal to Handel. Like Piovene he had felt the influence of French drama, and had actually produced his own version of Pradon’s Tamerlan for performance at Pratolino in 1706, introducing a character called Rossane ‘so as to follow the Italian custom of bringing at least two women on to the stage’. For the libretto, which Handel was later to use for Rodelinda, Regina de’ Longobardi, Salvi turned to Corneille’s Pertharite, Roi des Lombards, produced in Paris in 1652, but he may well have done this with an eye to the current vogue for ‘Gothic’ subjects among Italian librettists and composers. Looking, for example, at the list of operas given at Venice between 1700 and 1710 we can find at least nine, including such titles as Edvige, Regina d’Ungheria, Berengario, Re d’ltalia, Engelberta, Fredegonda, Ambleto (Apostolo Zeno’s version of the Hamlet story) and an adaptation of Pertharite made by another librettist for Pollarolo.

  Salvi’s treatment of Corneille is sensitive throughout to the nature of Italian opera as opposed to French tragedy, but even more interesting is the way in which Handel and Haym treated Salvi. Large amounts of recitative were whittled away (even with its wordbooks the English audience is unlikely to have welcomed recitativo semplice as a dominant element in the work) and though the proportion of arias was not seriously reduced, their distribution was adjusted so as to throw the major figures into greater relief. Certain new scenes were added which bear witness to the imaginative strength of the collaboration. We shall never know whether Haym or Handel was responsible for the interpolation of such poignant utterances as Bertarido’s ‘Dove sei’ and Rodelinda’s ‘Ho perduto il caro sposo’, but they make perfect sense in their dramatic context.

  Rodelinda stands in complete contrast to the annihilating gloom of Tamerlano. From the outset Handel loads the odds in favour of the eponymous heroine, a wife who believes her husband is dead and repels the advances of the tyrant who has dispossessed him. Her music conveys all the strength of character which her opponent, the peevish, vacillating Grimoaldo, lacks. The arbitrary power that lays its threatening hand on the protagonists of Tamerlano is progressively weakened, in the palace of the Lombard usurper, by constancy and fortitude, so that when we reach the closing scene of Act III, in which Grimoaldo, wrung with remorse, wishes that he could change places with the shepherd of a poor flock, the conventional aristocratic hankering for pastoral simplicity is made the vehicle for a comprehensible change of heart, conveyed by the composer in one of his most melting sicilianos.

  The structure of the opera is arguably the finest ever achieved by Handel, and the seamless progression of its successive episodes is clinched by the skill with which aria and recitative are integrated throughout, either by the patterning and contrast of various keys – the first scene of Act I, for example, is entirely in flat keys and the opening scene of Act II moves from wrathful G minor to optimistic G major, associated throughout with Rodelinda’s triumphant fidelity – or by surprise shifts from one medium to the other, as in Edvige’s intrusion into Bertarido’s ‘Con rauco mormorio’ before the da capo or in the way in which his ‘Dove sei’ is made to grow straight out of the recitative, the vocal entry prefacing the ritornello. The four major roles were perfectly tailored to their original creators. It is certainly hard to think of another part, even Cleopatra, in which Cuzzoni’s vocal and expressive range was treated so sympathetically. Handel’s confidence in Borosini as an intelligent and discriminating performer is shown by his refusal to type-cast him: from a tragic father in Tamerlano he was transformed to a neurotic usurper in Rodelinda. The fact that Senesino had to play yet another ineffectual figure, the lurking fugitive Bertarido, and was awarded the statutory prison scene, leads to the conclusion that this was the sort of part he did best, admired as his stage presence was by certain of the audience.

  Rodelinda, with its ‘capital and pleasing airs’, ran for thirteen nights and was the first Handel opera to be published on a subscription basis. Its success with the ladies at the King’s Theatre was partly attributable, according to Horace Walpole, to Cuzzoni’s stage costume: ‘on her appearing in this opera in a brown silk gown, trimmed with silver, with the vulgarity and indecorum of which all the old ladies were much scandalized, the young adopted it as a fashion, so universally, that it seemed a national uniform for youth and beauty.’ Cuzzoni was three months pregnant, timing her delivery nicely for the inter-season break in August. Mary Pendarves wrote snobbishly to her sister: ‘Mrs Sandoni (who was Cuzzoni) is brought to bed of a daughter: it is a mighty mortification it was not a son. Sons and heirs ought to be out of fashion when such scrubs shall pretend to be dissatisfied at having a daughter: ’tis pity, indeed, that the noble name and family of the Sandonis should be extinct. The minute she was brought to bed, she sang “La Speranza”, a song in Otho . . .’ Well, maybe, though this was not originally written for her, but for Margherita Durastanti, who had sung the role of Gismonda in the earlier opera.

  Her ascendancy with the public was not to go unchallenged for much longer. A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, threatening dissolution not merely to Cuzzoni’s English triumphs but to the entire Academy, emerged in the form of several newspaper paragraphs, which began to appear during the autumn of 1725. On 31 August the Daily Journal announced that ‘the Royal Academy . . . have contracted with a famous Chauntress for 2500 l. who is coming over from Italy against the Winter’. A week later the London Journal put things a little more bluntly: ‘Signora Faustina, a famous Italian Lady, is coming over this Winter to rival Signiora Cuzzoni’; while Parker’s Penny Post told its readers that ‘the famous Italian Singer, who is hired to come over hither to entertain his Majesty and the Nobility in the Operas, is call’d Signiora Faustina; whose Voice (it is pretended) has not yet been equall’d in the World’.

  The engagement of the celebrated Faustina Bordoni had in fact been a rumoured possibility as early as March 1723, when the inimitable London Journal had commented: ‘As we delight so much in Italian Songs, we are likely to have enough of them, for as soon as Cuzzoni’s Time is out we are to have another over; for we are well assured Faustina, the fine Songstress at Venice, is invited, whose Voice, they say, exceeds that we have already here; and as the Encouragement is so great, no doubt but she will visit us, and like others, when she makes her Exit, may carry off Money to build some stately Edifice in her own Country, and there perpetuate our Folly.’ That summer Thomas Dereham, an Englishman resident in Florence, where Faustina was currently appearing, wrote to Zamboni: ‘She is endowed with a particular gift of grace & vivacity in her singing, not to be matched butt by some angel . . . Indeed musick is arrived to a great pitch in our age, so that I believe it will fall in the next, as painting and sculpture has done in this.’

  Also involved in dealings with the soprano was Owen Swiney, the former impresario of the King’s Theatre who had ‘broken’ and absconded following the second performance of Handel’s Teseo in 1713. Ending up in Italy, at a safe distance from his creditors, Swiney had re-established contact with the theatre as an agent for hiring singers and also began sending libretti to the directors for consideration. Early in 1725, after transmitting enthusiastic reports of Faustina, he was asked to begin negotiations with her, but though her contract was signed that June, she had to honour an engagement in Vienna during the forthcoming season.

  Faustina was certainly a notable acquisition. Daughter of a noble family, she was born in Venice in 1700 and, as an orphan girl, protected by the patrician composers Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello. Her debut at the age of sixteen in Pollarolo’s Ariodante brought her immediate success and she had gone on to become one of the most
popular singers of her day, and perhaps the first great prima donna in the star tradition, which has lasted into our own time. Princes and ambassadors showered gifts on her, but as the librettist Apostolo Zeno significantly observed: ‘whatever good fortune or encouragement she meets with, she merits it all by her courteous and polite manners, as well as talents, with which she has enchanted the whole (imperial) court.’ Like Cuzzoni she was small, but could carry this off very well and had the advantage, not only of great beauty but of being a very good actress. Unlike her rival she was endowed with common sense and a secure awareness of her supremacy. She was famous, as a singer, for her sustained notes, the result of perfect breath control, her fine trills and excellent diction. ‘In short,’ as Quantz remarked, ‘she was born for singing and for acting.’

  It is hard to imagine what the directors thought they were doing in bringing the two leading Italian prima donnas of the decade on to the Haymarket stage together. The desire to load an operatic organization with expensive foreign stars is a well-known phenomenon, and will go on attracting audiences and wrecking theatrical bank accounts until barbarism suppresses the adornments of civilized living. Common, too, is the fallacy that by flinging together a host of ‘names’ an evening’s performance will somehow render greater justice to the music. Add to these familiar notions the presence of that other habitual figure the opera buff, with which London society was now teeming, and the eagerness to welcome Faustina is easily explained, however foolish the decision to invite her. The history of the Academy from the early summer of 1726 onwards is one of prolonged artistic and financial suicide.

  As it happened, Faustina did not turn up until the season was very nearly over. It had opened on 30 November 1725 with a revival of the pasticcio Elpidia, which had been brought on to finish the previous season in May and June. A Haym adaptation of Zeno’s I Rivali generosi, its music was selected by Handel from the newest Venetian operas of the previous year. As these were all from the current San Giovanni Grisostomo repertoire, this confirms an idea that Handel kept in touch with the theatre’s personnel long after Agrippina. London audiences could now hear bang-up-to-date Italian music in the shape of three arias by Giuseppe Maria Orlandini and thirteen by the young but highly influential Neapolitan Leonardo Vinci. Five of Cuzzoni’s arias in Elpidia, incidentally, had been composed for her future competitor Faustina. Did Handel come to savour this irony later on?

  Borosini and Pacini starred in these performances, but left the company before the new season began. Handel’s failure to bring on a fresh opera may have had something to do with the difficulty of finding replacements. None of them was in any case especially remarkable. When the new work was finally completed, in March 1726, it was hurried into rehearsal and produced within ten days. Much practice would not, in any case, have been necessary as the singers, Senesino, Cuzzoni and Boschi at least, knew the theatre perfectly by now and there was no such thing as a separate producer in early eighteenth-century opera (the production detail, of the simplest, was up to the singers, occasionally helped by the librettist). Entrances, exits, gesture and movement were at the performer’s discretion, and stage properties were limited to the odd table or chair. Large sections of the music may have been issued to the artists as the opera was being written, and domestic rehearsal was a commonplace (Zamboni, in a letter to Riva, mentions ‘a clandestine rehearsal in your house’ of Ariosti’s Vespasiano).

  The new opera, Scipione, was the result of a hastily revised schedule owing to Faustina’s late arrival. Handel had originally planned to feature her in a version of Ortensio Mauro’s libretto La Superbia d’Alessandro, whose composition he now broke off, turning instead to one of his stock of Florentine texts, Publio Cornelio Scipione, originally for the Leghorn carnival season of 1704 and probably by Antonio Salvi. Rolli, who took up as Handel’s librettist after a break of some three years, retained most of the recitative material but rejected the arias in favour of his own. The story concerns the famous ‘continence of Scipio’ in sacrificing his love for a Spanish princess to her happiness in the arms of his rival.

  Rolli’s restitution was like the return of an ill-boding fowl. Why, after three consummate successes, the partnership with Haym should so suddenly have been dissolved is not yet clear. What is obvious is that Handel and Rolli did not work well together, and that the works they produced during these last troubled years of the Academy’s existence were each flawed by a dramatic ineptitude, which a more responsive librettist could have smoothed away.

  Scipione is a case in point. Admittedly the circumstances in which it was put on were distinctly unsatisfactory. A part for the heroine’s mother, Rosalba, perhaps intended for Dotti, was cut and the third act was comprehensively reshuffled, so that Costantini, in the soubrette role of Armira, got no aria at all. But the libretto itself is weakened, partly by the unattractive nature of Scipio himself, whose continence is made the result of a last-moment change of heart unconvincing here, whereas, in Rodelinda, Grimoaldo’s crise de conscience seems psychologically quite justifiable, partly also by the atmosphere of ancien régime courtly trifling in which the successive amatory situations are contrived.

  These factors are all evident in Handel’s musical response. For the first time since Floridante we can sense the composer going through the motions of making an opera. As we should expect, the music is often pretty and tuneful, the recitative is handled with characteristic flair, and attention is paid to a governing tonal framework, in which G, B flat and related keys predominate. There is a good showpiece in Berenice’s ‘Scoglio d’immota fronte’, placed, according to custom, at the close of an act, and richly scored for two oboes, an independent bassoon part and three violins. Yet, for all this, the work sags under the pressure of composition and Handel’s occasional loss of interest. There is a predominance of 3/8 time (eleven airs out of twenty-three in a piece dominated by triple measures), which so often spells triviality in the operas. A still stronger indication of the composer’s half-hearted approach is given by his reliance in the ritornellos on a particular kind of formulaic semiquaver passagework, which those who accuse late Baroque music of facility associate with the influence of Vivaldi and his Italian contemporaries. We can find this scattered throughout, not only in the more lightweight pieces, but embedded in grander concepts such as the symphony opening Act II, Lelio’s first number, Lucejo’s bird simile aria ‘Come al nazio boschetto’ and even in ‘Scoglio d’immota fronte’ itself.

  The work was initially successful. ‘The march which was played on the drawing up of the curtain, for Scipio’s triumph, was a general favourite, and adopted by his Majesty’s life-guards, and constantly played on parade for near forty years.’ It was later to provide Cowper with the rhythms for his ‘Loss of the Royal George’, and has since become the official anthem of that pocket sovereign the Lord Mayor of London. Handel, however, had bigger fish to fry, for Faustina Bordoni, ‘whose arrival forms an aera in the annals of musical contests’, soon afterwards landed in England and the dangerous fun began in earnest.

  In planning an opera designed to show the Haymarket stars in all their unabashed virtuosity, his eye had fallen on a piece originally written by his old Hanover acquaintances Agostino Steffani and Ortensio Mauro. Of all Handel’s dramatic works, Alessandro belongs most irredeemably to the vanished operatic world of the early eighteenth century. Serious producers and conductors, imbued with the ideals of Felsenstein and Strehler, meet their challenge in this romantic confection, with its scenario of scrambled incidents from the life of Alexander the Great, interwoven with a ‘love interest’ for the hero and a pair of Indian princesses. Its techniques are those of cinema (indeed, it recalls one of the more florid Cinecittà sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s) with swift cuts from one exotic location to the next and a grandiosity of musical gesture, which brings us closer to the magic and spectacle of Rinaldo and Amadigi than to the antechambers and garden walks of Ottone and Rodelinda. The language of the whole work is that of careful overstate
ment, a shining heap of stunning effects.

  The opening battle scene, describing the siege of Oxidraca, is the most elaborate in any Handel work, with its sixty-two-bar symphony taking life, as it were, from the crude heroics of Alexander’s defiant:

  Ossidraca superba, contra l’ira del Cielo in van contrasti:

  Son prole del Tonante, e tanto basti.

  (Proud Oxidraca, in vain you oppose the wrath of heaven:

  I’m a descendant of Jove, and that’s enough!)

  The band which, with players like Geminiani, Dubourg and the Castrucci brothers, was now on topping form, was given its head throughout the work and Handel works a second French overture into the fabric of the drama by opening the scene in the temple of Jupiter Ammon with the initial flourishes and following up the subsequent recitative with the fast fugato section. Act II is introduced by a recitative and arioso scored for a brilliantly augmented orchestra of paired flutes, oboes, bassoons and divided strings. Horns colour the jolly six-part coro and appear in the unusual, not to say unique, ensemble movement, which accompanies the returning victors after the battle.